A reduction in the number of foreign students coming to study in the UK is
harming the economy, Boris Johnson has warned.

The Mayor of London hit out at Government’s tightening of visa controls for students after it was disclosed that there was a 22 per cent decrease in the number of foreign students last year.

His intervention will anger ministers including Mark Harper, a Home Office minister, who last week welcomed a dramatic fall in net migration.

David Cameron has said he wants to see net migration fall to the “tens of thousands” by 2015.

Official figures last week showed that in the year to September 2012 a net total of 153,000 migrants came to the UK, down from 242,000 in the previous year.

“I looked at the recent figures for foreign students coming to this country and I did not regard what seemed to me to be a reduction in those numbers as necessarily a positive economic indicator,” Mr Johnson said in a speech to the Global Universities Summit in London.

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“I think we need to push higher education as a great, great international export and we need to be even more open in our dealings with other [higher education] institutions around the world.”

Mr Johnson has previously said that rules preventing foreign students staying in the UK after graduating unless they get a £20,000 job are putting many people off British universities.

His comments came after Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, used a speech at the same event to warn that public “panic” over immigration is causing economic harm to the UK.

He said overseas students were being deterred from studying at British institutions and that tight visa controls were causing difficulties for foreign experts working in the country.

Mr Cable said that the continued debate over immigration “does incubate these very deep emotional feelings about foreigners”.

Highlighting problems with the visa regime, he said: “I was at one of our leading engineering companies a few months ago.

“I was introduced to the chief engineer, who was making the most sophisticated engines for Formula 1 cars and he happened to be Indian, and he was coming to the end of his visa and under the existing rules he was going to have to go back to India and reapply for admission to the UK, right in the middle of a high-pressure contract. It was completely absurd.

“But that is the kind of restriction that is introduced in order to placate public panic that does create an economic harm.”

Mr Harper last week said that the fall in net migration showed that the Government is now operating “a more selective system that works in our national interest”.